Remember when you first saw stories about the clubbings of baby seals? Remember that nasty business? Well, now I’m reading — though it seems to have been popular for a while — that people are eating horses as dinner.

Horsies? Like Mr. Ed? You can’t you eat Mr. Ed.

Allow me to paint you a picture of the travesty in question. Let’s say Mr. Ed’s family decides they don’t love him anymore. Either he’s gotten too expensive to take care of, times are tough, and let’s face it, Ed was kind of an arrogant asshole for a while there. So, his family decides to auction him at market to be sold as meat, so he can be shipped thousands of miles until he is outside the U.S. borders where he can be inhumanely slaughtered and sautéed into waffles, pasta or crepes.

When I first read about Mr. Ed unceremoniously being turned into a Horsie Dynamite Roll, I wondered what third world nation could possibly be behind this. But to my surprise, it turns out these horse auctions take place right here in the U.S. In Indiana, to be precise. That’s Ford Country. Leave it to the heartland to give us the most disturbing news yet.

Thanks to recent court decisions cheered by many animal rights groups, Texas and Illinois are the last two states to officially ban horse slaughter in the whole of the union. As an unfortunate result, the horses who used to meet their fate at the relatively “humane” American slaughterhouse (think Javier Bardem’s weapon of choice in “No Country For Old Men”) are now being shipped thousands of miles to meet their maker in a much less cosmopolitan setting — either in Canada or Mexico. After which they’re shipped as meat for human consumption to such countries as Belgium, France, Italy and Japan.

For ranchers, it’s an economic decision to either make a dime at auction or lose two in burial and execution expenses. For lawmakers, it’s a classic example of trying to do something good but not accounting for the repercussions. For all the horse lovers, there are no easy answers, as shown by the fact that the American Quarter Horse Association is against the domestic slaughter ban, while many thoroughbred associations support it, and the American Horse Council has declared itself neutral.

But the ban is here. You can’t just lift it. You can’t say, “Sorry everyone, we were lying. Horsies are fine to slaughter here in the States. Carry on.”

But that in itself won’t solve the problem. A further step must be taken: namely, to ban the sale of horses intended for meat. Either that or one of our over-worked ambassadors should convince our gourmet neighbors that eating Mr. Ed is simply wrong.